Measuring Guide For Wood Flooring
When you are considering purchasing wood flooring, the first thing to do is to determine exactly how many packets of flooring you need. The only way to do this is to work out the area of your floor in square meters.
If you’ve never measured a floor before then it might seem intimidating, but it’s actually an incredibly simple task. All you’ll need is a tape measure. Ideally you’ll want to use a rigid, metal tape measure and of course the tape measure will need to be long enough to stretch from one end of the room to the other at the longest point.
Measuring a Square or Rectangular Room
Measuring a room that is a regular square or rectangular shape is incredibly easy. All you have to is measure both the length and the width, and multiply them together. This will give you the area of the room in meters squared.
For example, if your room is 10 meters long and 12 meters wide, your room will have an area of 120 square meters.
One tip is to open your door and measure into your doorframes. This is because your flooring will usually sit underneath the door.
Measuring an Irregular Shaped Room
Most homes in Britain tend to have at least one irregular shaped room. L-Shape rooms and T-Shaped rooms are fairly common. Fortunately it’s just as easy to measure these. All you’ll have to do is divide the room up into square or rectangular sections, and add the numbers together. If you have a particularly strangely shaped room then it might help you to use masking tape to divide up the room into sections.
Alcoves, Fireplaces, and Similar Features
If you have a fireplace jutting out into the floor away from the wall, then you can safely ignore it. As long as you are measuring the wall at the widest point, then you will be fine.
If you have alcoves recessed into the wall, then these will need to be measured and added to the total. If you have any integral cupboards in the room with doors that measure down to floor level then you should measure into them, to ensure that your flooring sits under the doors.
Converting from Imperial into Metric
In this country, wooden flooring is always sold by the square meter. However, many people still have tape measures with imperial measurements on them. There’s no need to go and buy a new tape measure, all you need to do is divide the total number of square feet by 10.76.
Purchasing Flooring
When purchasing wooden floors, you will always need to buy slightly more than the area of the flooring to account for any wastage. Here we recommend 10%. If you have calculated out a figure that is only just over the amount you’d need to buy an extra pack of flooring, then you should always err in favour of buying the additional pack. This means there’s no chance of delaying your project by running out in the middle of the job, and you’ll always have perfectly matching spare flooring ready to repair any damages that might happen in future.
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